Damn it all...

Damn it all...

Mad at myself right now... Mrs. Arquebus is a careful cook and fussy eater. I don't mind the eating part, but while her cooking is usually very enjoyable, I knew I should've stepped up tonight.

A little back story: I'm not one of those guys what you see on television that bag a near record animal every time they go afield in pursuit of game. While I love to hunt, there is a huge disproportion to getting a kill and coming home without ever having taken a gun off safe, the result of seeing nothing other than sparrows and assorted livestock. (Yes, the thought's occurred to me...) And while I have more than my share of deer kills annually, there are those dry periods that exist; the nice big, fat, slow moving and unaware doe I took this year ended a three year drought.

So I take my venison seriously. It's better than beef, healthier, and damned difficult to get in comparison to anything wrapped in plastic down at the Kroger. Tonight, the little woman announces we're having steak, and asks if I'd like anything with it? I say yes, mushrooms, sauteed, please, and some feta cheese on top of all that, thankyouverymuch. And then she sets out to bake us up some steaks in an aluminum pan in the damned oven. It's here that I object, and say "Sweets, the best (only) way to truly prepare a good piece steak is to fry the bejeezus out of it. Get it in a damned hot skillet, and keep it moving, ya know?"

Here's where I fuck up. She says "Hmm, yeah... well, you're the steak man, you wanna do this?", and I say "No, you've done this before and did it well. Damned hot and moved a lot. Simple." This is where I get the first tickle of doubt, but I ignore it.

Long story short, after about 1/2 an hour of cooking, she says it's ready, and lays a tepid piece of vulcanized meat on my plate, three and a half rubber mushrooms, and a few cubes of feta. It's fucking ruined. The meats gray, eats like a beefy kitchen sponge, and it's curled into some kind of Moebius-esque study in plane geometry. Her's is still cooking, as she's appalled by anything appearing even remotely reddish in her meat, and I can see that the gods damned flame under her bullshit teflon pan is producing roughly same amount of heat as a lit birthday cake for a grade schooler. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I dragged this fucking deer outta the damned woods, with a rope, in the cold, after tracking and field dressing, toting my gear and shotgun... God damn it all.

Worst of all was what she did to hers. I sawed mine up and ate it quickly and quietly while it still remained a few degrees above room temperature. When she finished her's it looked like the end result of a rather casual and laid back surgical procedure. Anything with even the least bit of gristle or fat* was excised precisely and expertly, laid out in dark gray ribbons varying in length, and accounting for at least half of the net weight of the steak AFTER it was cooked. And as we don't have a dog to feed it to, it was unceremoniously thrown out.

*Fat and venison are often mutually exclusive; venison is notoriously lean, and animals I've taken out of the hills of southeastern Ohio are not only 88% sinew, they're gamey, the result of their running up and down very uneven terrain, drinking coal mine flavored stream water, and subsisting on a diet of grass and acorns. Any kind of marbling on venison makes for damned fine eating, and the ones I've been taking the last few years live in the middle of pool table-flat corn fields. Here they eat, live, and love, growing fat, and enjoying their existence.)